Dr Sudha Venkataswamy
Associate Professor
SIMC, Pune
Some films announce themselves; others arrive gently and linger with surprising persistence. Ilish, screened on the opening morning of the Symbiosis Film Festival 2025, belongs firmly to the latter category: measured in tone, yet unexpectedly revealing about the emotional mathematics of domesticity. Himjyoti Talukdar’s 14-minute Assamese short fiction is adapted from a short story by Riju Hazarika, whose talent for observing ordinary lives with wit and precision is woven into its narrative texture.
The premise is delightfully straightforward. At its centre is a tender longing: a wife’s desire to eat ilish (Hilsa), the expensive river fish celebrated for its rich flavour, delicacy, regional identity, and cultural significance, far exceeding its famously intricate bones. Her husband brings home a fresh ilish, clearly requiring financial stretching and an act of care in a household accustomed to delayed desires and practical compromises. And then, with the ease of a gust of wind through a half-shut door, arrives a guest: a man faintly remembered yet instantly accommodated because Indian hospitality has a reflex built stronger than doubt. Here, Talukdar touches on something culturally precise: the instinctive reshuffling of domestic plans to make space for the guest, even when that space must be carved out, thereby forgoing someone’s wish.
The film’s emotional tension is never overstated; it resides in the household, with a calm, observational eye. The rhythmic chopping, the sizzle of tempering, the choreography of ingredients being readied – this is where the real story unfolds. In those small movements, we sense both the possibility of indulgence and the fragility of it. This aesthetic restraint prevents the film from slipping into melodrama and instead pushes viewers to lean in and feel the emotional undercurrent.
Aparna Dutta Choudhury plays the wife with a performance that feels lived-in rather than performed. Her anticipation registers in the briefest changes of expression, a softening around the eyes, and a smile that doesn’t quite complete itself. Dib Jyoti Kakati, as the husband, walks the familiar tightrope of domestic duty with understated precision, trying to honour both affection and hospitality without disappointing either. Jyoti Bhuyan, as the guest, is quietly excellent: not imposing, not oblivious, merely unaware of the delicate emotional economy he has disrupted.
What elevates Ilish is its understanding of middle-class aspiration and the balance between longing and limitation, with stability as its true protagonist. The short ends not with triumph or loss but in recognition of how families move around one another in unpretentious, precise arcs with care expressed, expectations adjusted, and a household finding its balance again.
This short film also finds company within a meaningful cinematic lineage where fish becomes an emotional or narrative anchor. Bengali cinema offers similar examples, for instance, Maacher Jhol (2017), where a dish serves as the conduit for reconciliation, or Asha Jaoar Majhe (2014), where fish appears in the quiet grammar of shared domestic life. Once again, in the Bengali short film Ilish Mach, hilsa has been used as a metaphor for class vulnerability. Ningthouja Lancha’s Manipuri short video film, Ilisha Amagi Mahao (2008) (The Taste of a Hilsa), based on the short story by N. Kunjamohan, was also made in Assamese, showing the struggles for survival of fishermen.
Assamese cinema, however, has seldom placed a fish meal at the emotional centre of a story. Talukdar’s film gently opens that door.
Ilish is delicate, precise, and full of fine bones, each catching the light just long enough to convey its emotional weight. And, inevitably, it leaves behind a craving: both for the fish and for more films willing to notice life with such attentive clarity.